Word: sharked
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Fordham can't be more specific because biologists are only beginning to understand how sharks live and behave and what their relationship to other sea creatures really is. That's hardly a surprise, since sharks spend most of their time out of sight of human observers. Thanks largely to increasingly sophisticated electronics, though, scientists are finally opening a window on the life history of the shark...
...make reasonable but vague assertions like Fordham's more rigorous, for example, marine biologist Chris Lowe, a colleague of Meyer's at the University of Hawaii, has developed an ingenious way to measure the role of one shark, the hammerhead, in a well-defined environment. Every year thousands of hammerhead pups are born in Kaneohe Bay, on the east shore of Oahu. (About 40% of shark species lay eggs; the rest bear live young, and some of these carry their young just as mammals do, with an umbilical cord connecting the fetus to the uterus.) For the next 12 months...
...happens, the university's shark-research lab is located on Coconut Island, right in the middle of the bay, so Lowe can study them easily. In order to understand how much impact a hammerhead has on the bay ecosystem, Lowe is trying to learn how much energy it expends and how much food that takes. He has designed a miniature sensor that attaches to the baby shark's back and registers every beat of the tail as the shark swims along. By feeding the babies a precise amount of fish, then putting them in a tank with constantly flowing water...
...second part of the experiment, Lowe puts a sensor-equipped shark into the open bay and follows it as it darts back and forth. After two days of nonstop tracking, he and his exhausted crew have a precise record of where the baby has gone and, by counting its tail beats, how much energy it has used. "We still have a lot of data to gather," he says, "but once we really understand what role the hammerhead pups play here, we can use that to begin understanding how adults fit into the ecosystem of the open ocean...
Back in Honolulu, on the other side of Oahu, the tiger-shark tagging is another high-tech effort to understand a different aspect of shark behavior. In 1992 two people were killed by tiger sharks in Hawaiian waters, the first such deaths there in three decades. An earlier spate of killings had provoked an all-out program to eradicate tiger sharks, but it was never clear whether that slaughter had been really effective...